"Free speech" does not equal "freedom from being criticized" or "right to an audience". Me making fun of your argument or calling your argument stupid and x-ist is me exercising my free speech just as much as you are exercising yours in making you argument in the first place.
But that being said, I would argue that going on campaigns to get someone fired from their job or preventing people from making their argument in the first place and the like is against free speech the ethical value, even if not against the legal principle.
A lot of times what people are really talking of when they express concerns about "free speech" is the ethical value. This is frequently countered with an argument about the legal protection, but that's kind of missing the point IMHO.
I can disagree and oppose your opinions by exercising my own right to free speech. I can afford you your own pulpit, air time, and freedom to make your point, and then I can take mine and make my point as loudly as I can. I can schedule a march or rally the same day, across the street.
This is what "pro-speech" dissent looks like.
I can also disagree and oppose your opinion by removing your right to free speech. I can contact people who might give you a platform, and convince them not to do so. I can attempt to impose consequences for you legally, socially, or physically that discourage you from speaking. I can shout over you from across the street, to ensure people can't hear your speech.
This is what "anti-speech" dissent looks like.
And, IMHO, "pro-speech" is more important than almost* any consequence of speech.
* The sole exceptions probably being speech that inspires imminent action to violate any person's individual rights (e.g. violence) or that has an imminent or fundamental threat to bring about a change in government to one which does not allow, support, and respect free speech.
Why do you cut the line there? What evidence do you have to include or not include these or other things? How do you define violence? Is causing brain damage violence? AFAIK it's possible to do that only by speech.
I've never seen an argument which wouldn't be possible to be phrased a way by which it wouldn't be "heresy", and include everything which isn't about changing others' feelings. For example, immigration. Almost 100% of useful arguments about immigration are not "heresies". The problem is when somebody is against immigration, and "forget" to mention that they opinion can cause death. Useful arguments don't "forget" this.
Unless inaction or speech is directly and unmistakeable the cause of someone’s death, then they cannot be held responsible for that death and trying to do so is just an attempt at manipulation.
https://www.verywellmind.com/childhood-abuse-changes-the-bra...
This states clearly otherwise.
You cannot cause cellular damage to a human’s brain by talking to them.
And in that way the dictators can fool the citizens in democratic countries via their own newspapers
If Alice wants to talk but Bob doesn't want to listen to her, then he indeed shouldn't have to. But if Alice wants to talk and Bob does want to listen to her, then they should be able to without Karen being able to stop them.
and a year later 100 Bobs kill those that look like so?
That's one consequence of totally free speech unfortunately
That's true, but also I think people sometimes have an overly narrow focus on one single aspect of legal protection - especially, in the US context, the First Amendment. While 1A is the most crucial way in which the US legal system seeks to support that ethical value, there are other ways – something which violates the ethical value of free speech may not violate 1A, yet may violate other legal provisions.
To give just one example – California Labor Code sections 1101 and 1102 outlaws political discrimination in employment in the State of California. This can provide added protection to the ethical value of free speech compared to 1A. 1A does not prevent private employers from firing employees for publicly expressing particular political views – at least in some cases, 1101&1102 will. And a few other states have similar legal provisions, and there is always the chance that more states could adopt laws like this – getting state laws amended is far easier than amending the federal constitution, or putting in place a Supreme Court bench which will interpret it a certain way.
Showing up to shout someone down who had people voluntarily show up to hear them speak because you feel like you are empowered to unilaterally decide and enforce through aggression who is “allowed” to speak in your city or on your campus, is inherently an act against freedom of speech. It’s also the ultimate act of “entitlement”, getting away with it is the ultimate act of “privilege” to be allowed to so utterly disrespect another person’s rights.
There is no other way to color this and very little nuance here. “Platforms” in the virtual space have more leeway as they’re mostly privately owned and extended as a privilege of access, not a right. Shouting down speakers in public (or paid and invited) venues though is unequivocally against freedom of speech.
Is it though? And to what extent? We don't have unlimited freedom of speech in the US constitution because we agreed that there are limits and realize that words do mean things (like a threat).
But on a platform let's be nuanced. Some people believe that saying a racist word and having their comment removed is deplatforming. Some think they can promote violence. Others think getting down voted is deplatforming. There's a lot of people getting grouped together here and many making claims of being deplatformed are not acting in good faith.
So unfortunately we need to define what deplatforming means otherwise we'll just be arguing and making assumptions because many people will be working off of many different definitions pretending that we all agree on the definition (or that we hold the true definition and others are dumb).
I.e. anything that restrains an individual's ability to make future speech in a manner equal to that of their peers
Another useful distinction in the argument would be between "commons platforms" and smaller ones.
It feels like past time that we recognized market realities and codified them into law to distinguish rights and regulations. If you are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Snap, or ByteDance (or any subsequent arising entity with a large enough market share in some public/social market) then you the public should have different access rights to your platforms, on the sole basis of their public ubiquity.
Or ... falsely smearing people and companies, potentially anonymously?
Or ... doxxing journalists, government officials (including judges), doctors that refused to give Ivermectin, or rape victims?
From a higher level, I'd grant that (a) platforms have a fundamental right to try to realize their vision, which may include promoting and demoting various types of content & (b) spam and astroturfing is a constant reality in any social platform (and users are better served by less of both).
So I think there are justifiable reasons for censoring, or at least decreasing visibility. I've been on forums long enough and have too low an opinion of the average internet denizen to think otherwise. :-)
Hence, to me, the emphasis on ad vs post hoc restraint.
If I allow you to make speech, and then, on the basis of that piece of speech and NOT on your identity as its speaker, decrease its virality in a way that's still fair (e.g. yank it from feed promotion but still allow direct linking) and then (in rare cases) absolutely censor it, that feels fair. To me.
If I proactively identify you, godelski, as someone likely to say *ist things and consequently ban you or pre-censor everything you post, irregardless of the individual pieces of content, that does not feel fair. To me.
As well, and I should have punched this more in my comment, as emphasizing "individual." Which is to say "1 human person, 1 share of public speech rights."
IMHO, if free speech is a right that flows from our existence as sentient beings then it's difficult to get from there to "you deserve more / less free speech than I do."
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And finally, because I know I'll get this response eventually, yes, I know playing whack-a-mole with bad actors on a public platform is a nigh impossible task. I've done it. Maybe actually impossible.
Tough.
Uber skirted labor laws in pursuit of profit. Social media platforms are doing the exact same in terms of nuanced moderation in pursuit of profit. "It's difficult" or "It costs a lot to employ and train the headcount required to do it" isn't an acceptable defense, and we shouldn't accept it.
I'd grant that (a) platforms have a fundamental right to try to realize their vision, which may include promoting and demoting various types of content & (b) spam and astroturfing is a constant reality in any social platform (and users are better served by less of both).
I am all for shielding platforms from liability for user content if they act like a common carrier and limit themselves to removing illegal content. However I don't see why we as a society should shield companies from liability when they selectively pick and choose which user content to promote and which to suppress, according to their own preferences.
Right now, HN has the right to delete those. If it was a common carrier, it would presumably not. Arguably they're spam, but I cannot imagine a way you can define "spam" that is narrow enough to not be redefined by everyone as "things I disagree with", but broad enough to capture someone posting excessively to a forum. Note that this wouldn't violate the CAN-SPAM act because it's not advertising anything commercial.
Of course I support the idea of "off topic", but it is something that needs a lot of consideration and however one writes such a restriction, it's liable for abuse and probably has a zillion edge cases. E.g. is it off topic if I post "<your favorite politician> hates cat videos" onto a cat video forum? What if I am a moderator with <other side> political views, and I allow those posts if they come from people that agree with me and disallow them if they come from people who agree with you? What if I divide my site into multiple sub-fora, one of which is "politics of cat videos"? What if de facto use of my forum or a sub-forum becomes political discussion, but that everyone attaches a cat video to each post?
In other words, yes, I have thought a lot about it, but this warrants its own separate discussion.
I strongly prefer to have have the individual ability to block/mute/suppress any comment or commenter, and I am ok delegating that ability to someone or something else as long as I can withdraw my delegation and undo any changes that were made. To put it differently- I might decide that I trust some organization or individual to build block/filter lists and I might consume those lists (as I do for spam blocking, ad blocking, etc.), as long as I can observe what they're doing and opt out at any time. It seems social media is long overdue for that.
I am NOT ok with anyone (or anything) else doing these for me without my explicit opt-in, especially if I don't have any way to see what decisions they made on my behalf or to reverse those decisions.
I'm yet to see a convincing argument that broadly, one person's free speech right always trumps other's freedom of association when the other doesn't like your speech, for any reason.
Individuals are inherently endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Corporations are explicitly allowed whatever rights we choose to afford them, in pursuit of profit and maximizing their ability to put capital to productive ends.
Saying "an individual speaks" is very different than saying "Facebook speaks."
What opinions would Facebook have? And what fundamental desires would Facebook's opinions stem from?
There is no basis (or case law) to say biological people's free speech rights overrides legal people's freedom of association right everytime - but I've seen the "free speech absolutists" take this as a given.
A group of individual persons, associated for a specific purpose, are not equivalent to an individual person in matters of fundamentally-owed rights.
If you're trying to say businesses should be required to file with the government and get subject to business regulation, they already are?
Groups are entitled to greater-than-zero rights, in order to support their accomplishing their purpose in an efficient manner, but I'm curious why they should be owed person-equivalent rights?
It's not? If I throw my own party I can decide to uninvite the other bad neighbor down the block who always gets drunk and trashes everything. If I form up with my other neighbor and throw a block party, we can also decide to uninvite that same drunk neighbor. Are you saying that because it's a block party and not my personal birthday party, we should be forced to invite this person and have the party trashed, because uninviting them is a person-equivalent right? Or maybe I'm not allowed to do this at a personal birthday party either, because my wife and brother and I all formed a group to plan it? Please help me understand here, maybe this is a bad analogy.
To use this analogy, yes.
Or perhaps better, the block party shouldn't automatically have a right to not invite them, because a block party is not a personal party, and the right of the block party to not invite them should be weighed against other rights before being granted.
Because, as you noted, equating block party group rights with your personal rights ultimately leads to "just form a group."
Which, in US law, also clashes with the fact that some core rights we give legal groups (in corporate form) to allow them to operate efficiently are limited liability (with respect to their members as individuals) and limited transparency (with regards to their internal workings and ownership).
So free speech + limited liability + limited transparency = problems.
If I dislike someone, and I host an event, it's by definition a "group" thing, there's no real way to distinguish a personal gathering from a group gathering. But under your proposed system, I, an individual, can't exclude any person from a group gathering. Being unable to choose who I associate with is a fundamental infringement on my right of association. If I'm forced to associate with everyone, I'm not free.
Edit just to respond to something:
>Because, as you noted, equating block party group rights with your personal rights ultimately leads to "just form a group."
I don't know how you got that, this seems to be very backwards. The group was formed before the rights were even considered.
It seems to me that any scheme for depriving people of the ability to exercise their rights in various contexts, for example because they are trying to do so as part of a specific group, could be subject to serious abuse.
Platforms that promote certain content are absolutely free to do so and should not be forced to do anything else. But it should be understood that this is their motivation and their choice. They do not practice freedom of speech or freedom of opinion. They advertise for something and it is not about any intellectual discourse and probably more about advertising.
If you accept that, then what about a company that is owned by two people? Or three? Ten? 100?
How many people have to own a company before the owners are no longer allowed to decide who they allow to use their platform to espouse their views?
Facebook is run by a collection of humans. Those humans make choices, as humans, that collectively we think of as "Facebook".
In the cases I'm mostly referring to in my comment, the "platform" was perfectly fine with the speaker, and invited them (or accepted their money in exchange for use of the venue), so, yes, their freedom of association is /also/ being violated when someone comes in to shout down the speaker.
Basically, if a privately owned space is promoted as a "commons" and acts as one, some of the rules about speech start changing.
To fully make your argument, you need to convince people that the overall philosophical point of "free speech" is worth societal value even beyond that which we have accorded it via law (assuming you're in the US).
Coming from someone who doesn't agree with you, but who doesn't agree with your opponents either.
Where I disagree is the "legal" qualifier: while legal protections have an important role to play, so do civil institutions and social norms. Many forms of suppressing free expression are entirely compatible with the First Amendment (economic and social sanctions), and instead have to be defended in civil society, and the court of public opinion.
The way the Constitution works is that the Federal government only has those powers it is granted, which are limited by items such as the First Amendment, which does not generally restrict individuals (including corporations--there is no "cf" here; corporations are simply people, though they are not 'natural persons", where that distinction matters).
More specifically, to shrink “free speech” smaller than it's legal definition, and erase both part of what is legally protected and the fundamental premise of the legal protection, in that you want it prohibit private exercise of free speech rights essential to forcing ideas to complete in the marketplace of ideas by compelling private actors to actively participate in relaying speech that they find repugnant.
The more interesting dynamic to me is the free-market, anti-regulation, low-corporate-tax capitalist politicians arguing we should create regulations to make the market less free.
I am saying that people who are seemingly opposed to that stuff are the first to shout that Twitter is a private company and thus can manipulate its userbase however it wants.
> The more interesting dynamic to me is the free-market, anti-regulation, low-corporate-tax capitalist politicians arguing we should create regulations to make the market less free.
Yeah, and it’s good that people finally loosen up their radical stances and start to realize that the state isn’t the only source of oppression.
One thing to consider is that this argument is being used rhetorically to force interlocutors into an uncomfortable position. If you are a famous politician who has been championing the unrestricted free reign of corporations to pollute, abuse employees, abuse customers, etc. for decades, but now all of a sudden you're upset about certain decisions those companies make regarding their own products, people are going to throw that in your face.
The argument will continue to be made until those arguing for tighter controls over corporate free speech agree that corporate power in other areas must be checked as well. I'm all for greater oversight of Twitter that would lead to more free speech. But I'm not going to start arguing for it until there's a broader recognition that corporate power writ large needs to be reduced, not just at the corporations which make things politically uncomfortable for certain politicians.
To me, it seems like some politicians would like to pass laws against e.g. Twitter specifically that would help them politically, but they would like to preserve corporate power in general where it benefits them. They want corporations to be people when it benefits them, but they don't want corporations to be people when it's politically inconvenient.
That's not how this works. Until conservative attitudes about corporate power and corporate personhood shift generally, Twitter will retain the power they have now, since they are people according to conservatives.
That wasn’t my experience. It seems like people are generally guilty in believing what is expedient regardless of their political affiliation.
My radicals friend all do the same thing, one of them even participate to witch-hunt/deplatforming rally despite being morally against it, just to be able to say 'but isn't a corporation a moral person?'. Until this notion is broken (and if we could break Limited liability too...), i don't think anybody can legitimately argue against deplatforming.
So join with anarchist/trotskyist, ecosocialists and all the radical left against corporation as moral person, and you'll find a lot of allies for your freedom of speech fight.
Banks are not however, and in fact, banks and the financial system do act against classes of people. Visa and Mastercard frequently pressure their customers in an effort to prevent sex work in the name of preventing sex trafficking. If their customers do not do enough they will cut them off. This most recently happened with OnlyFans. See also PornHub.
Like, Cloudflare or Twitter should be free to choose what speech they publish and what they prohibit, but they (and banks and electricity providers) should not be banning someone because of who they are as a person or for their political views expressed elsewhere. Cloudflare should be free to ban Daily Stormer as they did, but if the same people from Daily Stormer were just running a cat picture site through Cloudflare (and publishing their neo-Nazi stuff elsewhere) then IMHO Cloudflare should not ban their cat picture site.
To choose an extreme (but less-political?) example of paedophilia, it's obviously okay to ban distribution of child sexual abuse material, but IMHO someone who's just came out from prison after being convicted for child rape should not get automatically banned from platforms (or banks, or electricity providers) as a person despite being a paedophile child abuser, they should be able to participate in the society unless/until their ongoing acts become criminal and they get removed from the society by the courts. And if that's the case, then it also applies to the less extreme views.
But you can, via Twitter and Facebook.
Communication is its own different animal
You could, however, advocate for the creation of a publicly-owned Internet platform where all speech would be acceptable. Why don't you do that, instead?
Much like the Fair Housing Act of 1968 restricts the Constitutional property rights of earlier bigots who didn't want to sell property to the "wrong" type of people, society by and large will likely be okay with violating the Constitutional property rights of the illiberal who don't want to allow the "wrong" type of people to use market-dominant services.
Illiberalism is illiberalism, regardless of whether it comes from the right of the left.
Second, you can't easily separate the property-rights issue from the free-speech issue; they are naturally intertwined. In this case, that property (equipment, software, etc.) is being used specifically to broadcast speech, and we don't force people to repeat the speech of others (using mechanical devices or otherwise).
Finally, fairness as a platform concept was once a thing imposed by the FCC up till the 1980s (due to the scarcity of broadcast channels) and is now dead. We've replaced that with the possibility of infinite numbers of outlets. There's nothing stopping someone from building an anything-goes Twitter. And in fact, people have tried, as recently as two years ago (remember Parler?), but they end up dying from their own radioactive contamination.
Regarding the second point, actually we do (or did; the Trump administration rolled it back and the Biden administration is trying to re-instate it) "force people to repeat the speech of others"; one of the points of the FCC's net neutrality definition was "No blocking: This includes a right to send and receive lawful traffic, prohibits the blocking of lawful content, apps, services and the connection of non-harmful devices to the network" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...) and even deplorable speech is still lawful.
Regarding the third point, lots of online services died before the dominant incumbents of today came to power, e.g. AltaVista, Lycos, etc. Various conservative media outlets, like Fox News, are still around and thriving; you can bet they are watching and learning from these failures. Whose to say that one of them doesn't dislodge the incumbents and it becomes your viewpoint that needs protection? Public opinion is fickle.
(As an aside, sorry if my original post was confusing; I need to get better at writing.)
How hard does someone have to believe something before it crosses the line into religion? Or is it just a matter of paperwork?
"People will be ok with this restriction because it's similar to this earlier clearly correct restriction."
The second paragraph is saying that the practices that the FHA banned were also illiberalism, just like the current practices of the current service providers.
And there is no charitable interpretation or benefit of the doubt needed; it's crystal clear. In order to even have the option of reading it the way you keep trying to, I'd have to ignore: referring to the landlords who had their bad behavior banned as "bigots"; putting scare quotes around both cases of "wrong"; explicitly calling the current platform providers illiberal.
Okay but what about when I want to use the pulpit? By your logic, if you're using the pulpit you are restricting my speech, because I can't exercise my speech while you're exercising yours. And by that token, if everyone in the town square wanted to shout you down and drown you out while you were at the pulpit, you can't really complain on the basis of free speech, right? Because any restrictions on their shouting would encroach on their free speech rights.
Apparently this is what we call "cancel culture", and the reason we're still talking about it today is that people complaining about it have no coherent ideas on how to fix it without also trampling all over the very free speech principles they are decrying have been violated.
This knot people have tied themselves into is fascinating.
What people are describing as "cancel culture" is a totally different phenomenon.
But even if you have the space according to whatever schedule is set up, I and all my friends can still go to the square while you are talking, and we can open our mouths to scream at the top of our lungs for as long as we like. Right? That's unrestricted free speech, is it not? For the government to come along and tell me to close my mouth, that would abridge my free speech rights.
> What people are describing as "cancel culture" is a totally different phenomenon.
I'm not sure. I've seen the term applied to almost any kind of restriction of speech, no matter how benign or justified. It's so broad as to be meaningless at this point.